


When I Die, Let Me Go

by ReaperWriter



Series: These Lines Across My Face [7]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Angst with a Hopeful Ending, Character Deaths- Plural, Found Family, Grief and Loss, M/M, One on screen, Two off screen and mentioned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-10
Updated: 2020-09-10
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:07:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26383876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ReaperWriter/pseuds/ReaperWriter
Summary: When Booker met Gwyn, one of the first things she did was sacrifice herself. When the end of their long friendship comes, it's no surprise that she leaves him the same way.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: These Lines Across My Face [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1852702
Comments: 11
Kudos: 61





	When I Die, Let Me Go

**Author's Note:**

> This story starts off with references to both Andy and Quỳnh having met their final deaths. And then from there, we see the story of Gwyn's. It's going to hurt, but it's also got hope to it.

When they come together to sprinkle  Quỳnh’s ashes in the same place they’d sprinkled Andromache’s, two hundred years after they lost their leader, they all sit around a campfire late into the night, sharing alcohol and stories. Joe and Nicky, wrapped in one blanket. Nile, who stepped into the command role she never wanted with grace anyway. The newest among them, Olivia, who had been killed in the resistance fighting a corrupt government in South America, a beautiful woman of mixed indigenous and African origin. Booker leaning forward with a stick stirring the embers. And Gwyn, her head tilted back and eyes on the sky.

“I’m glad,” Gwyn murmurs after a time, “that she went fighting. No warning. It’s what she’d have wanted.”

Nicky nods from his place across the fire. “She hated how much time Andromache had to think about it. Even if she too went down fighting in the end.”

“I can’t imagine having this, and suddenly being mortal again and having that fear.” Olivia shivers. “I’d rather go fast.”

“I don’t know,” Nile ponders. “It gave Andy a chance to remember what being truly human was. I think she appreciated that in the end. If I’m that old when I go, I hope I get a chance to remember that.”

“Might be nice,” Joe adds his arms holding Nicky close, “to actually grow old. Slow down.”

“Only with you, caro mio.” Nicky turns his head, kissing Joe’s cheek.

Booker looks out over what little remained of the steppes that had birthed Andromache of Scythia. “I think I’d prefer quick and clean.”

Nile glances back at the last member of the party, whose gaze has returned to the heavens. “Gwyn? What about you?”

She lowers her head, a soft smile on her lips. “It’s never been my choice. I’ll go however I go, when it’s my time.”

“You’ll nick yourself,” Olivia laughs, “and know it’s time to slow down.”

“Perhaps,” Gwyn sighs, shrugging and laying back on her blankets. “Perhaps.”

***

It happens like this.

Five hundred years after they scattered Andromache of Scythia’s ashes, three hundred years after Quỳnh’s joined them, the world impossibly remains. Smaller with climate change and population, light pollution and technology expansion. It’s so much harder to hide, but people live longer if they don’t die as humanity continues to fight itself, so they manage.

But when crises erupt, the coverage is almost wall to wall thanks to drone mounted cameras that can go where fragile cameramen can’t.

Gwyn left them two months before, when their work had reached a level of blood shed she couldn’t quite tolerate. She hugged them and kissed them and promised to join them when this set of missions ended. She had work to do. Something a contact had reached out on. In her skill set. Diplomacy and unstable governments.

They’ve wrapped things up when the country she’s in goes hot with a contested election and a crack down on the opposition. One that sees the opposition leadership fleeing over the northern border, but the rumor is their children didn’t make it out.

No one can raise Gwyn. Not on any secure channel. Not through any contact. No where. She’s a ghost in the wind. They’re on the southern border, blending in at a refugee camp and preparing to go in for an extraction when the news goes live, flaring up on every screen in the camp.

Five adults, leading the children of the opposition parliament and their candidate out. On foot. And within miles of the border.

It’s going down in real time, drones capturing the whole thing. Three men, two women. Seventeen children, ranging in age from two to sixteen. The older kids help carry the younger ones. The adults do the same. They’re moving as fast as they can.

But not fast enough for the two armored all terrain vehicles behind them. 

Booker and Nile gasp when one of the women stops. Hands over the precious child she’s carrying. Trades her knapsack for one a man has. Takes his gun too. 

Neither of them speak whatever language she’s speaking, but they recognize the gist.

Go.

I’ll hold them.

Run.

They’re a mile from the border.

She turns, ripping open the bag and pulling out old spike strips that someone had to have found in a museum somewhere. She assesses her terrain, then plants the strips before grabbing the bag and riffle and making for cover in some bushes.

The way she moves, the burning brand that is the braid down her back, gives her away. 

Nile grabs his hand and squeezes so hard, Booker feels the bones crunch.

“Gwyn,” Nicky breathes from a second screen across the tent from them.

The vehicles hit the strips and the sound of tires mangling is only broken by the sharp retort of the rifle as bullets hit first one and then the other engine block.

The truck doors fly open and return fire in the direction of the shots, but nothing in the bushes moves. 

Only when the shooting stops does Gwyn spring up and run, sprinting like a rabbit away, not in the direction the children went, but due east toward the foothills.

The shot catches her in the thigh and she goes down with a scream.

Two goons are on her in minutes, dragging her back.

“Merde,” Booker breathes. “Merde, Merde, Merde.”

They dump Gwyn on the ground in front of a man in tailored clothes. She manages to make it to her knees before he back hands her. 

“Fucker,” Olivia mutters.

Gwyn spits blood at the man’s feet and forces herself back up to kneeling.

The man growls something at her.

Gwyn laughs at him, then spits words back.

Suddenly, a voice in the camp calls out, “They made it!”

The screen splits, showing the children and the other adults making it through the demarcation zone at the border, being met by peacekeeping troops and ushered to safety.

Booker misses it. His eyes are on the man. On his rage. His fury. On his hand as he steps to the side and raises the gun to Gwyn’s temple.

Gwyn looks straight into the camera, looks Booker right in the eye. Then she smiles and closes her eyes.

The gun goes off.

Booker screams.

He can’t help it. He can’t stop it. It’s rage and fury. He’s going to go into this country and cut that man’s heart out of his chest and then stomp it into the dirt. 

“Shit,” Olivia mutters. “Shit, she’s going to heal, and they’re stuck there. They’re going to find out.”

Booker turns around, looking for something to punch. Someone to punch.

But Nile stays unmoving, watching the drone footage that’s focused on Gwyn’s body.

After a few minutes, Nile lets out a soft, “Oh.”

“Oh?” Olivia says. “Oh what?”

Booker looks up then, to find Nicky and Joe clasped together, on the floor, silently sobbing.

He turns back to Nile to find tears streaming down it. “Nile?”

“She’s still bleeding, Book.”

No. No, No, No, NO.

Booker pushes Nile and Olivia out of the way, steps close to the screen. The drone is close to Gwyn’s body now. So close he can see that the pool of blood under her thigh is almost as big as the one under her head. That she’s not breathing. Not moving. 

“This is like the ship,” he whispers faintly. “It...she’s healing slowly.”

“Book,” Nile murmurers. “She’s not.”

“You’re wrong.”

“ Sébastien,” Nile says, and her voice is soft the way Gwyn’s always is when she calls him by his name. His real name. “I’m sorry. She’s gone.”

She’s gone.

***

It goes like this.

Nile refuses to let Booker destabilize the country further by slaughtering it’s dictator right now. “I am not saying never. I am saying not this moment. We have to take care of our own first.”

After that man and his goons are picked up and driven away in fresh vehicles, after they leave Gwyn lying there in the dirt like so much trash, the five of them cross the border with a stretcher and a body bag.

Nile does let him and Nicky shoot down the drones. That helps.

Gwyn lies there like a crumpled doll. She’d closed her eyes, but the shock of the shot must have opened them. Glazed brown irises stare at nothing. Her jaw hangs slightly slack. When Booker reaches down and touches her cheek, her skin’s gone cold.

“I don’t forgive you,” he whispers softly.

It doesn’t bring her back this time.

Gently, Olivia and Nicky step in. They lift her out of the pools of blood and move her to a spot of clean grass. Olivia takes wet wipes from her bag and uses too many of them to clean the dried ichor off her head. Then they work to straighten her out.

Booker looks away when they have to break bones to fight the rigor that's set in. Gwyn won’t feel it now. She’s safe. She’s free. But it shatters his heart. Joe comes over and stands facing him to keep watch in the other direction. His brother grips his arm tightly. There are still tear tracks on his face, disappearing into his beard.

Nile finds the pack abandoned in the bushes, but it’s not Gwyn’s. 

When they make it back to the camp, it’s late. Nile makes arrangements with a contact to helo them out in the morning. One of the women helps Nicky and Olivia pack the body bag inside of a second bag of chem-ice. 

Booker wants to get shitfaced drunk in a way he hasn’t in centuries. But he won’t. Because he knows it won’t change anything.

“Excuse me.” 

He turns and a boy is standing there. He blinks, and for just a second, it’s Jean-Pierre. It’s Ioan. It’s a hundred other kids he’s known and loved and helped.

“Oui?” he says, exhausted. 

“Were you one of her friends? Miss Gwilla?”

Gwilla. Her last false name on this earth. He hadn’t known. “Yes. We were old friends.”

“I’m…” The boy's English seems to fail him for a moment. “I am very sorry. She was very brave.”

“Yeah, she was.” Booker nods. “Thank you.”

The boy holds something up. “This was hers. She said if anything happened, to please be sure her friends got it.”

Booker blinks, reaching out and taking the canvas rucksack. It’s both startlingly heavy and impossibly light. “I appreciate it. You did good, kid.”

“Jerick.”

“You did good, Jerick. She’d be proud of you.” 

The boy tears up, then nods and walks away.

Booker takes the bag and goes, finding the tent they’ve been assigned for the night. It’s like a military barracks, basic cots, no luxuries. It’s like a morgue, because there’s a body in the corner.

Sitting on his cot, he opens the bag. Inside, he finds two meal replacement tubes, a bottle of water, a number of things carefully wrapped in wax cloth, and a leather-bound journal with what appear to be five envelopes sticking up from it’s pages. Pulling that free, he flips to the first one and finds his name in a neat hand.

“Merde, Gwyn,” he mutters, wrenching it loose. He should wait for the others.

He looks at the body bag in the corner.

He can’t wait a minute longer.

_ Dear Sébastien, _

_ If you are reading this, I didn’t make it out of this one. Please note, this is a new letter, written expressly for this utter shitshow of a situation. I haven’t been carrying it for centuries. About a week before the current dictator in chief went from ‘free and open elections’ to ‘over all of your dead bodies’, I dropped a glass and cut my hand. A thing I’ve done a thousand times before. Only this time, the wound bled freely for an hour, and then scabbed over and lingered. If you are in possession of my body and check my left hand, you can probably find it. _

_ I always wondered what Andromache thought in that moment, when she knew her time was ending. If it was relief, or regret, or some complicated mix. For me, it was bittersweet. I once told you that death is an old friend, and how like an old friend to send advanced warning of their intent to come to call. But to know I’d be leaving you behind. My beloved brother. My beloved family. That aches. I’m sorry for the grief I’ll leave when I go. It’s alright if you don’t forgive me for it. I understand. _

_ I’ve always had hope of what comes after this. Of seeing those we’ve lost again. My family. Yours. Andromache and  _ _ Quỳnh. Getting to meet Lykon. Manvir and Bargitta and Ioan and James. I’ll be there when your turn comes. Until that day, remember to let go of the pain and find the joy. Let my memory become one more piece of seaglass.  _

_ I return the book you gifted me to you, with thanks. _

_ With my love,  _ _ Sébastien, your sister, always, _

_ Gwynog _

He pushed the paper aside before the tears could stain it. 

Inside the rucksack, wrapped in wax cloth, he finds the copy of Juliana of Norwich he’d given her all those years ago.

That, he let be marked with his tears.

***

It ends like this.

It is raining. It is Wales, so this is no great surprise. He remembers that it rained frequently those centuries ago when he spent a few years living in a guest cottage on a Pembrokeshire farm and sorting himself out with the help of one of the gentlest hearts he ever knew. One of the fiercest too.

The sea has risen, but not so much here. The cliffs have kept Wales safe yet. Time, though, has been another matter. Lack of resources and apathy to faith have slowly consigned the church that bore her name to an ivy covered ruin.

The stained glass had disappeared behind the vines, choked out and broken. Pieces of the roof had gone. The tower only stood by sheer force of will. And the gravestones were wearing to nubs.

It is here they’ve come, bearing the small olive wood box of ashes. One Joe made with his own hands. 

The others initially argued they should bring her to Andromache and  Quỳnh, to make that the tradition. A family plot of sorts.

But Booker stood firm. Gwyn should go home. Andromache had gone home. Andromache was Quỳnh’s home. But Gwyn’s home was Cymru. She was their saint. Let her lie with her people.

Olivia and Nile dig the hole against the side of the church, going deep so hopefully the box would lie undisturbed. Joe and Nicky stand by with flowers, bought in town from a few different florists, armfuls and armfuls.

And Booker cradles Gwyn, his friend, his sister, the woman who pulled him back together and set him on a path to living, one last time. 

When the hole is ready, he steps forward. Pressing a soft kiss to the lid of the box, he gently settles her into the earth.

“When I was at my darkest, Gwyn was the light that pulled me out. She showed me how to live with my grief, to find purpose.” His voice trembles, and he swallows around the tears threatening to choke him. “She loved fearlessly, recklessly. All of us, and so many people beside us. The world is a smaller, sadder place without her.”

Olivia spoke up, “From the day I met her, she never made me feel anything less than welcome and loved. This life is hard, but she made it easier.”

“She gave me the strength to keep my faith,” Nile said, fingering her cross, “even when it seemed impossible to reconcile with who we are.”

“What she did for Nicky, for us,” Joe whispers, his voice cracking, “we could never repay it. But she never expected that.”

“Gwyn never sacrificed herself because she believed her life had no worth,” Nicky adds. “She did it because she believed all life had worth, and it was a price she was willing to pay. To the very end.”

“To St. Gwynog,” Booker concludes, the tears finally leaking down his cheeks. “May we all see her again someday.”

“To St. Gwynog,” the others chime in.

After, when they’ve tossed dirt on the box and filled in the grave, when they’ve piled on the flowers, the others walk away, leaving Booker standing there. Touching the wall above the spot one last time, he whispers, “I forgive you and I love you. Rest well, ma souer.”

Then he leaves.

***

It begins like this.

A young man named Kauri dies stopping an assault on a young woman in an alley in Auckland.

And then he wakes up.

**Author's Note:**

> If you've read the almost 80,000 words in this series, thank you. Thank you for taking the time. Thank you for the kudos and the comments. Thank you for sharing this journey with me.
> 
> The Old Guard means unfathomable amounts to me, and when I conceptualized Gwyn, I didn't realized how much exploring her would come to mean. Even though her story is over, she'll have always been a part of loving this fandom for me. So thank you for that.
> 
> I'll be writing other things, though I need a few days to breath and figure them out. 
> 
> I'm TheAdventureofHistoryGirl on Tumblr and BiSwampWitchAuntie on The OldGuard Discord. Come yell at me and say hi.


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